


not with the sins, but with the sinners.

by lannisnow



Category: Hunger Games (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Future, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-28
Updated: 2012-12-28
Packaged: 2017-11-22 16:56:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/612085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lannisnow/pseuds/lannisnow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Society has rebuilt itself, for the most part. Everyone lives in peace, but in the darkest corners of his mind he remembers a time where this was not how it was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	not with the sins, but with the sinners.

There was a part of him that always loved to create. He would put together puppet shows for his parents when he was little, and he has crumpled up pieces of paper still hiding in dark corners of his room where he sketched out foreign lands, foreign beasts, and foreign weapons. His mother calls him an artist and has some of his painting framed in their home, but when he sees them all he sees is a need for improvement.

On one canvas, his mother’s favorite, is a wall of flame. It devours the trees in a synthetically straight line. Man-made fire would be hard to pull off. Balls of flame would be harder.

In the foreground of the painting is a girl, young, pretty, crouched and staring at the flames as they surround her. He doesn’t know who she is, but she was there. When he was painting, she was there.

People end up in his drawings frequently. All of them are mysteries to him.

Except one.

He saw her in school.

It was a long time ago, back when he was just a junior in high school, and she was a freshman. He used his free hour to prep for his science teacher, and she brushed past him, smiling shyly and squirming past to go sit at her seat as the hour ended and another started.

When she started coming to him in dreams, he painted her. She is a little different, with her hair a shade brighter red, her face more narrow. Sometimes, she is laying dead in a forest with berries in her hands. Others, she is dodging mines on the ground. But she is there, a lot.

Four years later, he sees her again, and he smiles when she catches his eyes.

***

“How many more papers do you need graded?” Nero asks, grabbing the stack on the desk and sitting across from his English professor. The man shrugs from his seat.

“That should be right. Maybe a few more from the essay pile.” Nero smiles and nods, grabs a few more, and makes himself comfortable as he corrects them.  
It is six in the morning. He is tired and grading half-assed papers written by college freshmen about a book they most likely glanced at on the internet.

There is a knock at the door forty minutes later. Nero’s head is drooping, eyes closing over the words as he marks errors and takes away points. In front of him, his professor jolts awake as he does. They clear their throats. Nero keeps silent as his professor bids the outside entry.

“Sorry to bother you,” a sweet, gentle voice pipes through the door. She comes in, red hair tangled up in a loose bun, wearing pajamas and flipflops in what must be cool, autumn weather. Nero raises an eyebrow. She catches his eyes and he smiles.

It hits him like a brick. A solid weight slamming into his chest and he can feel himself saying “No, let her go. She’s too evasive, anyway. We’ve got to deal with the District 12 girl.” District 12? Districts are hundreds of years past. There are no Districts, not anymore. They are old history, but he heard himself say it. He heard it.

“We’re not busy,” Nero says, putting his pen down. His handwriting was getting sloppy anyway. He needs to wake up.

“I just wanted to confirm this paper. You marked this paragraph, a couple sentences,” she moves to the professor, pulling out her paper and pointing at it. It’s quite dramatic, the way her finger slides across it.

“I don’t correct freshman papers. He does.” It’s put so bluntly that she drops her hands and looks between them, questioning.

“What was it that you had a question on?” Nero asks, leaning back in his chair. His hand reaches up and scratches the stubble of his beard. She moves around the desk and bends over, pointing a little more furiously.

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘Rephrase’,” she replies, fingers making crinkles in her paper. Nero smiles.

“It didn’t make any sense-” he glances up at the top right corner, “-Ember. You go off on tangents. Try to keep it to a point. This is a book report. There shouldn’t be any kind of... Personality.” Her name. Ember. He doesn’t care about her paper or the fact that her eyes are fiery with unsaid disagreement, but her name is his to know.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Ember grunts, leaning against the desk and eyeing the paragraph.

“Sure it does. Like research. Just description.”

“Then what’s the point? Why do I have to write this if you just want clones?”

“I don’t want them. He does.” Nero points to their professor.

“I don’t want them. My curriculum does,” he argues back.

Ember does not respond. She grunts something under her breath and turns to leave. And, while Nero finds the sight pleasant, he can’t help but call out for her.  
“I hope the paper turns out a clone by the time you’re done,” he says, smiling tauntingly at her. She turns, glares, and slams the door shut.

“That’s not the way to a lady’s heart, Nero,” his professor scolds, grabbing another paper and taking a drink out of a flask hiding in the top drawer of his desk.

“I’m not looking for a way into her heart,” he responds with a raised eyebrow and a patronizing nod at the flask. “You’re drunk and imagining things.”

“Sure I am. Whatever you say.”

***

She comes to him in another dream. This time, he knows it is her, but it isn’t. Not in appearance. It’s a wolf, a dog, a fox, growling, snapping in a cage. He reaches out to pet her and she snaps at the bars, screams, high-pitched. He reaches out again and she is calm under his fingers. Her wide eyes search his. They stare, digging into his soul. He smiles.

“You’re a good girl,” he says, scratching the shell of her ears. She whines and rubs against the bars. “You’re going to get the girl, aren’t you? Get her for me.” She knocks her head against his hand, puts her nose to the ground and smells the metal base of her cage. “Soon.”

“Seneca! We have a problem!”

Nero’s eyes snap open.

***

Seneca.

Nero grabs twenty different books from the library that afternoon. He searches through the historical nonfiction section, looking for anything to find the name. It isn’t common, not really. There was a burst of it somewhere, during a dark age of their history. Back when there were Districts.

There it is again, Districts. Nero grabs another book. This one is thick, two thousand pages and hard cover. All About the Hunger Games it’s titled, and Nero flips through the last few pages to find that there is an index. It’s a good thing, he thinks. He would hate to look through the entire book trying to find one name.

“What are you doing?”

Nero turns, eyebrow raised, masking his surprise. Ember stares back and pulls a book off of his pile. “The hunger games?” She laughs a little and flips it over, running her fingers over the pages. “I just did a report on these,” she says quietly. “A small one.”

“Take a history class?”

“Yes,” she says, smiling and putting the book back on his pile. “Thinking about majoring in it. You?”

“Art History major.” He grins.

“You’re the kind of person my father always warned me about, then? Starving artist?” Ember leans against the shelf and takes out a small baggie of berries from her pocket. Blackberries, that she pops in her mouth.

“Of course. You’re not supposed to eat in the library.”

Ember shrugs. “No one can find me. We’re in the back of the library. The books are dusty.” She swipes her fingers over a shelf, smiling. She rolls the dust on her fingers and flicks it onto the carpet instead.

“I suppose. Are you a freshman?” Ember nods. “Live on campus?” She nods again. “Maybe you and I should get to know each other a bit.”

“Maybe.” She grins. He smiles back.

When she turns to leave, she reaches over and grabs his hand. Her fingers pull out a pen and click it, write down her number on his palm.

He gets home and programs it into his phone.

***

“You’re special. I know you’re special,” she whispers in his ear. She’s pinned against the door with his body. He grabs her thigh, lifts it to his hip. His fingers leave trails of yellow, blue, red, black on her skin. He’s been painting. She interrupted him in the middle of his newest one, a small red wolf, dog, fox snapping at the heels of a young girl just off the canvas.

“You are, too,” he says.

“I dream about you.” Her voice is a whisper on his ear. He smiles against the skin of her throat.

They’re sliding down, onto the carpet. He leans over her body and smiles when her red hair falls onto the splatters of his orange paint. She grunts in disappointment, rutting against him and he bites her collarbone over her light jacket.

“I dream about you, too,” he says, dipping his tongue between her breasts. “Almost every night.” He doesn’t tell her that she’s sometimes a dead girl, sometimes a wolf, sometimes she’s dressed in a gown and having her hand kissed by a man on a stage.

“Sene-” she stops, catches herself, looks down at him with her eyebrow pulled together. He smiles. She smiles back.

“I don’t know your name,” he says. “In my dreams, you don’t have one. They call you Foxface.”

“The girl from District-”

“-from District 12.”

She moans and bucks up into his hands.

***

They don’t talk about it afterwards. She comes to him in dreams more and more often, usually more alive. He watches.

When they lie together in his bed, tired, sweaty, and panting, she reaches over and traces a design into his cheek. A pattern like a wave.

“You should shave your beard,” she says, “like this.” She traces more designs and he laughs himself to sleep, where he knows she will be until he wakes up.


End file.
